It’s about the "Per User Tax"
The panic over SaaS vs AI is simpler than people think. For years, we’ve been paying "Enterprise" prices for tools that are essentially just a UI on top of a database.
I'm a solution architect, and we recently looked at the $30/user/mo price tag for legacy test management tools. It’s insane. Why am I paying a "per user per month tax" for a glorified spreadsheet when I can pay $20 for an AI agent that can build me a custom version in a week?
So, we did exactly that. We used Claude and Cursor to "vibe-code" EZTest. A 100% open source, self hosted alternative that does 90% of what the expensive SaaS tools do, but with zero recurring fees and total data ownership.
The market is crashing because the "Application Layer" has been commoditized. If you can build and own your infrastructure for the cost of a few API calls, the era of renting basic software is over.
We aren't just building a tool; we're proving that the "SaaS Tax" is now optional.
Literally everything is a UI atop a database. Writing the data models, crafting the right uI and the right flows is non trivial. It requires iteration and that refinement is what customers pay for. The reality with SaaS stocks is they dont make anything critical. eg Take any large consumer tech company and they dont use Klaviyo. These companies build their own stack and one thats intimately connected with the data lake. It works for tech companies since they hve good data and it doesng work for non-tech companies because a good fraction of their data is trash.
That’s great. The overhead is that you have to host it and maintain the environment and app. If there is downtime that’s now your responsibility.
If that’s better than $x/month to be someone else’s problem then it’s a win.
Is there a middle ground that hasn't emerged yet?
Someone to host and manage your SLop-As-A-Serivce (SLAAS) for a price point in the middle.
That feels like a business.
Hey, that sounds like OpenAI!